Good keyboard. MotoBlur integrates e-mail and social networking well. Solid battery life.

Cons

Design renders it nearly unusable. Last year's specs. MotoBlur still running at Android 1.5. A boatload of bloatware.

Bottom Line

The Motorola Backflip is a mediocre Android phone with one of the worst designs I've ever had to suffer through using.

The Motorola Backflip, AT&T's first Android phone, is weird for the sake of being weird. It is a transporter accident. It is an abomination of design, encrusted with bloatware and built on top of a platform that should have been retired six months ago. Motorola, AT&T, and Google can all do much, much better than this, and I hope they will soon.

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Hardware
The Backflip lives up to its name; it's a backwards flip. When it's flipped open, it looks a lot like a Motorola CLIQ ($199.99, ) at 4.25 by 2.1 by .6 inches (HWD) and 4.7 ounces. But instead of having a sliding keyboard, it flips closed so both the 3.1-inch, 320-by-480 capacitive touch screen and the relatively pleasant, large-keyed keyboard face out. This is pointless and stupid. It's pointless because with the phone flipped closed, you can't use the keyboard anyway; the keys are disabled. It's stupid because the point of a flip is to protect the fragile screen and keyboard surfaces, and instead, this exposes them. In theory, you can sit the Backflip up on a table using the keyboard as a stand, to turn it into a media player, but I'll get to why you don't want to do that.

In case the backwards flip hasn't thrown you, Motorola has another freak show up its sleeve: the "backtrack." On the back of the screen is a trackpad. You will discover this when you accidentally activate it while holding the phone, making the cursor twitch every which way. Motorola claims this is a way to manipulate the phone without using the touch screen, but after using the phone for two days I couldn't figure out why I would want to use the backtrack.

The Backflip is a mediocre voice phone. It connects to AT&T's 3G network and to 3G networks abroad, as well as to 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi networks for data. Reception is not good. Call quality in the earpiece is decent, with lots of in-ear feedback of your own voice. Transmissions sound a bit muddy, and the speakerphone is a bit too quiet for outdoor use. At least battery life was solid, at 7 hours 29 minutes of talk time. The phone supports mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, but I couldn't trigger voice dialing with our Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99.00, ) headset.

The Backflip's 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201 chipset is the same one used in the T-Mobile G1 ($179.00 list, ) from 2008, and it should be retired by now. Benchmark results put the Backflip's performance somewhat ahead of older phones with the same chipset, such as the G1 and Motorola CLIQ, but significantly behind the Motorola Devour ($99.99-$499.99 list, ), Motorola Droid ($199.99 direct, ), and Google Nexus One ($179.99-$529.99 list, ). That means the phone often feels a bit sluggish in practice.

Software and Bloatware
The Backflip is a MotoBlur phone running Android 1.5. MotoBlur is the good part here: it's an Android overlay that gives you terrific Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Microsoft Exchange integration. It puts social-networking updates on your home screen, merges your contact lists, and creates a "universal inbox" for all of your direct messages. Unfortunately, it's built on Android 1.5, an old OS version that third-party developers are starting to abandon. Motorola has said they'll have an update for the OS eventually, but they won't give a date.

The Backflip is also larded down with an unconscionable amount of bloatware. Sure, it's great when companies add useful software to phones. But AT&T just added duplicate software to fulfill business agreements. So you have AT&T Maps, a TeleNav-based replacement for Google Maps which does the same thing, but much more slowly and with a rougher interface. (Fortunately, you still get Google Maps.) AT&T Music is a pointless collection of links to other things on the phone. AT&T Radio is a tease for a $6.99/month streaming radio service. MobiTV is a streaming TV service that I could not make work. AT&T Wi-Fi Hotspots is a link to a Web-based hotspot finder. And the Where app is actually evil; just by entering the program, it opts you in to a pay service that you have to voluntarily opt out of. Never mind what it does.

Several pundits have made a big deal out of AT&T changing the Android browser's home page to Yahoo! instead of Google. This is irrelevant. If you like Google, just change the home page back. I suggest you change it to PCMag.com myself.

Media and Conclusions
A combination of the Backflip's underpowered hardware and AT&T's hideous software makes the Backflip a frustrating media phone. Music plays fine, though there's no included syncing software (all that bloatware and no syncing software!) and you have to take off the battery door to access the microSD card slot.

I looked forward to propping the Backflip up to watch videos. This starts feeling like a bad idea when you realize that the phone's screen orients itself to portrait mode when it's half-open, making you crane your head 90 degrees to operate the UI. YouTube videos play in the proper orientation, but they're hideously low-res. MP4 videos had lip-sync problems, the Backflip doesn't support H.264, and AT&T's MobiTV program crashed multiple times.

The Backflip's 5-megapixel camera is disappointing. While it geotags photos like a champ, images have a blur problem, and low-light pictures are totally unusable. The 1.7-second autofocus delay feels interminable, and it results in cold, bluish photos. The phone takes soft, choppy 352-by-288 videos at 24 frames per second.

In short, do not buy the Motorola Backflip. Let it fade into oblivion. Motorola has promised at least 20 smartphones this year, so it's okay for them to have one stinker. Folks looking for a smartphone on AT&T should get the iPhone 3GS ($199.00-$299.00 list, ). Folks looking for an Android smartphone on AT&T should wait for the next one.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

Motorola Backflip (AT&T)

Motorola Backflip (AT&T)

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